Comment by Ididntdothis
6 years ago
The 90s were definitely a time when people thought deeply about how to make computer applications more usable. Apple also had excellent guidelines. Problem was that back then the hardware and the operating systems sucked. Now it’s the opposite. Hardware and OS are very stable now but applications are getting worse.
> but applications are getting worse
So many people say this but I fundamentally disagree.
Applications are so much more complex today, supporting more combinations of OS and input method and data storage and accessibility and display modes and whatnot.
Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more. Your interface has to work and be responsive whether your file sits on a local disk or in the cloud, or maybe has to be synced. It needs to work with mouse and touch and a screenreader. And so on ad finitum.
Relative to their complexity, applications are doing just fine today I think. (Also don't forget there were so many terribly designed applications in the 90's. It's not like everybody was even remotely following established UX guidelines.)
The same kind of clear UX standards just don't exist anymore because there are so many different apps that do so many different things, and there's no obvious best answer.
But the good news is that applications do slowly converge on best practices. Think of how things like hamburger menus or swipe-to-refresh or pinch-to-zoom have become expected standards.
> Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more
I use Microsoft office 2000, because since then, no new features have been added to word or Excel that I care about. In fact, I couldn't even name a single feature added since then. What they did add, is the ribbon instead of the toolbar, which makes it impossible to find things you need, and a whole lot of bloat.
On modern machines, office 2000 opens faster than I can release my mouse button from clicking its icon.
That is to say, I entirely disagree with your statement.
Me too! With the exception of Outlook, I stick with Office 2003. I'm so much faster and more productive with it.
The problem with the ribbon is I find myself constantly having to click back and forth between different tabs. It's annoying, and takes twice as many clicks to get things done. Microsoft lost sight of the purpose of a toolbar: to make commonly used functions ONE click away.
When the rest of the industry followed suit and emulated them, the result was a tragic loss of precious vertical pixel space for the content I actually cared about: whatever I was working on.
I also miss the elegant discoverability of classic menu bars. I loved being able to open a program and quickly become familiar with what tools are available.
They did a great job surfacing keyboard shortcuts. Hints were right there beside the menu items, subtly advertised every time you clicked them. You naturally learned the ones you used most. I worked alongside a younger guy for a few months who was blown away by how quickly I navigated around my PC and got work done, for many sequences using like 90% keyboard and 10% mouse.
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I just found out yesterday that you can import a picture into word and then remove the background, ala the selection tool in PS. Now while I'm sure most technical people would use PS or gimp or Paint.Net the fact that for 99% of other people there's an easy way to quickly edit photos is pretty incredible.
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I always say MS Office reaches its peak right before they introduced the ribbon in 2003. Since then I haven’t seen many interesting new features. They just keep moving stuff around.
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> that I care about
Well there's the rub.
There are tons of users who do require critical new features like cloud integration. And the ribbon was designed because specifically more people find it easier to use, as Microsoft's user research showed.
Office 2000 may very well be better for you. But it certainly isn't for everybody.
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Would've done this too, but then LibreOffice came along and IMHO, it's basically the same minus the proprietary issues, so it's even less hassle!
Recent Excel has a much more convenient interface for formatting pretty graphs than I remember from ~10 years ago. The available options are mostly the same, there indeed aren't really any new features in that, but it has live preview and more "visual" ways to modify the graph, compared to the gruesome modal interfaces that I remember where you have no idea what will happen until you "OK" it.
Excel 2007 introduced multithreading, which is very useful on large spreadsheets.
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> But the good news is that applications do slowly converge on best practices. Think of how things like hamburger menus or swipe-to-refresh or pinch-to-zoom have become expected standards.
Hamburger menus are literal garbage with a little bit of everything and zero organization. Give me a menu bar instead. Swipe-to-refresh is completely useless for well-behaving software and pinch-to-zoom often activates when I wanted to press a button instead.
Mobile device features were shoved into desktop UI without regard for desktop users. Desktop users' productivity has suffered as a consequence.
And you will have to click on that hamburger menu, since even on a device with a keyboard there will be no shortcut for using it. It's not merely nostalgia that has me pining for those bygone days of being able to drive almost every feature of every application from the keyboard, and having a clear culture of right-click-gives-context menu ... now on a Mac I'm resigned to apathetically pulling down menus with a mouse and playing guess-which-keyboard-modifiers-combine-for-this-menu-option.
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>Applications are so much more complex today, supporting more combinations of OS and input method and data storage and accessibility and display modes and whatnot.
But do they need to be that complex? Often times we are solving for the same problems (most CRUD apps aren't doing anything we didn't do in the late 90's), but devs have convinced themselves that all of this abstraction and overly engineered layering is necessary. It's often not.
Nobody asked for applications to support "more combinations of OS, input methods and data storage and accessibility and whatever else", developers decided to shove all that because reasons.
If applications are worse because they are doing so much more then they should stop doing that "much more", focus on doing one thing and leave the rest to other applications.
> Think of how things like hamburger menus or swipe-to-refresh or pinch-to-zoom have become expected standards.
That isn't a great example for best practice IMO since the only expectation i have about hamburger menus is for them to die in a fire.
> Nobody asked for applications to support "more combinations of OS, input methods and data storage and accessibility and whatever else
Really?! Just look at all the effort that people have spent their personal time contributing to projects like WINE for Linux for example. MANY many people want cross-compatability. I for one have certainly done a lot of waiting for things to become available for Linux, and very much appreciate all of the cross platform frameworks that exist and have existed in the past (WINE, Adobe Air, Electron, Cordova etc.) to enable cross platform software. I think they have been GREAT for the whole ecosystem, both for consumers and developers.
Making computers more accessible for visually or motor impaired has also been one of the great victories of modern software... and certainly not because developers have shoved it down peoples' throats. In fact they have had to REGULATE it in order to drag developers kicking and screaming into building accessible software.
As for input methods, that is just a natural evolution required from the proliferation of devices (desktops, smartphones, etc).
So sorry to say I don't think your statement is rooted in any kind of reality beyond what exists in your head.
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If things are so complex now why does Google Maps constantly shift buttons and menus around without offering new functionality? To me it seems designers are just spinning their wheels. The whole data driven UX stuff reminds me a little of Agile with its story points and velocity charts. Looks “scientific” but if you take a closer look it’s just BS.
Also Google Maps interface for EDITING routes, its main purpose, it's utterly broken. If you misclick, you must start over. Most late 90's offline editing maps were billions better.
But these cool kids will never understand functionality vs ubiquity.
I really hate how the order of "Images Video Maps .." changes on Google depending on the query. The UI shuffling around unpredictably makes it that much harder to find anything from positional memory.
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It seems like a lot of changes in software now are made just for the sake of change.
But in a way it makes sense for the developers, if there is nothing left to change or for them to work on, there is no reason for them to still have their jobs.
Why fix bugs when instead you can just move things around and make things more flashy in an attempt to make management think you are making the app more 'responsive' or 'increasing user engagement'
"Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more."
But do they? The move to web browser apps and the loss of rich native desktop functionality means that many web apps offer far less functionality than native desktop apps. The companies that offer these web apps sell them on their easy sharing capability and collaboration features.
An example: thirty years ago (or more), you could use any desktop word processor and perform basic tasks like spell check, change the colour of text, choose fonts and change their size.
Or today, in 2020, you can use Dropbox Paper without any spell check, no way to change the colour of text, no ability to choose fonts or even alter their size. But it does runs in a web browser. This is apparently progress.
I don't know why you're using Paper as an example. In 2020, you can use Google Docs which has spell check, text color, the entire collection of fonts at fonts.google.com available for instant selection, and so on. But I can also collaborate instantly.
That is real, apparent progress.
Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more. Your interface has to work and be responsive whether your file sits on a local disk or in the cloud, or maybe has to be synced.
Why? Why does every application need to be "cloud connected"? What's wrong with having a normal desktop application that saves files to the filesystem like every application did for thirty-odd years? The only reason for this that I can discern is that it's an easy way to lock users into paying a monthly or annual recurring fee, rather than a one-time fee for the software.
Users themselves are not asking for cloud connectivity. People understand files. They can save files, copy files to a thumbdrive (or Dropbox), and e-mail files as attachments. Files are an interface that people have figured out. We don't need to reinvent that wheel.
It needs to work with mouse and touch and a screenreader.
In my experience, older applications are far more screenreader friendly than new applications. Moreover, not all visually impaired people are so visually impaired as to require screenreaders, and the more skeuomorphic designs that were favored in the '90s and 2000s were far easier for them to use than today's flat designs where one can't tell what is and is not a button. Heck, even I get confused sometimes on Android UIs and don't notice what is a plain text label and what is an element that I can interact with. I can only think that it's far worse for people who have sensory and cognitive deficits.
As for "it needs to work with a mouse and touch", my answer is once again, "No it does not." Mouse and touch are different enough that trying to handle both in one app is a fool's errand. Mice and trackpads are far more precise than touch, and any interface that attempts to both mouse and touch with a single UI ends up being scaled for the lower precision input (touch), which results in acres of wasted space in the desktop UI.
The same kind of clear UX standards just don't exist anymore because there are so many different apps that do so many different things, and there's no obvious best answer.
Of course there's no obvious best answer if you're trying to support everything from a smartwatch to a 4k monitor with a single app. So why are you trying to do that? Make separate UIs! Refactor your code into shared libraries and use it from multiple UIs, rather than attempting to make a single mediocre UI for every interface.
But the good news is that applications do slowly converge on best practices. Think of how things like hamburger menus or swipe-to-refresh or pinch-to-zoom have become expected standards.
The problem is that all of these new "best practices" are far worse, from a usability perspective, than the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm that preceded them. Swipe to refresh is much less discoverable than a refresh button, and much more difficult to invoke with a mouse. Pinch-to-zoom is impossible to invoke with a mouse. Hamburger menus are far more difficult to navigate than a traditional menu bar.
When today's best practices are worse than yesterday's best practices, I think it is fair to say that applications are getting worse.
100% agree with your comment. One caveat though:
Mouse and touch seem like completely different things, but they're more similar when you consider pen/stylus input. 2-in-1 devices running a proper desktop-grade OS[0] are amazing devices, and one thing they're missing are properly designed apps, which are few and far between. 2-in-1 made me actually appreciate the ribbon a bit more - though an overall regression in UX, it shines with touch/pen devices, which I'm guessing was MS's intention all along[1]. 2-in-1s with pen are really magical things; I use one (a Dell Latitude) as my sidearm, and started to prefer it over my main Linux desktop on the grounds of convenience and versatility.
Best pen-oriented apps actually allow you to use keyboard + finger touch + pen simultaneously. You use pen for precise input (e.g. drawing, scaling, selecting), fingers for imprecise input (e.g. panning/rotating/scaling, manipulating support tools like rulers) and keyboard for function selection (e.g. picking the tool you'll use with stylus).
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[0] - Read: MS Surface and its clones.
[1] - For instance, Windows Explorer would be near-unusable as a touch app without a pen, if not for the ribbon that makes necessary functions very convenient to access using finger touch.
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> Why does every application need to be "cloud connected"? What's wrong with having a normal desktop application that saves files to the filesystem like every application did for thirty-odd years? ... Users themselves are not asking for cloud connectivity.
Of course they absolutely* are. I keep literally all my documents in the cloud. I'm constantly editing my documents from different devices -- my phone, my laptop, my tablet. Users like myself are absolutely asking for cloud connectivity. I simply won't use an app if it doesn't have it. Your argument makes as much sense of "why does every skyscraper have to have elevators? Users aren't asking for anything more than stairs!"
> Mouse and touch are different enough that trying to handle both in one app is a fool's errand.
Except you don't have a choice. Many apps these days are webapps, and absolutely require both interfaces to work. Many laptops also support both. That's just how it is.
> The problem is that all of these new "best practices" are far worse, from a usability perspective, than the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm that preceded them... When today's best practices are worse than yesterday's best practices, I think it is fair to say that applications are getting worse.
Except WIMP doesn't work on mobile. So it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
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> a time when people thought deeply
As opposed to "completely succumbed to metrics". Conventions like shift to range-multiselect/ctrl to toggle-multiselect cannot evolve from a series of a/b tests. It's not as if people never tested UI ideas back then, but it was a tool, not the entire process.
There has to be some gallery of horrible 90's windows program interfaces...
It was an experimental time, that's for sure.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm
http://toastytech.com/guis/
It was also a time when most people's experience with using a new operating system (nevermind different software) was their first, ui guidelines had different requirements because the use case was different.
Today most people's experience with using any single app or webpage is also their first, UI-wise, because nothing is consistent with each other anymore. So I'm not sure what this is an argument for.
> applications are getting worse
Citation needed
"Anecdata"
Today's rush to simplified, web interfaces means typically that common keyboard scenarios have been completely forgotten about. A market leader in a niche sector, re-built their UI in Electron, it's primary purpose is to selectively migrate items from one technology to another.
While it does provide a treeview hierarchical structure, with a checkbox next to each item, selecting that via say "spacebar" or selecting multiple items using CTRL+SHIFT does not function. As well, it's non-native scrollbar does not accurately reflect your position and does not allow finely-grained re-positioning.
This is $5,000/seat software that has glowing reviews and has essentially captured the market for what it does - yes a small market, with approximately 6-8 competitors - almost all of whom have copied their user-interface and even Electron implementation.
- Atrocious input lag
- Lagging menus and widgets
- You misclick in Google Maps? Better if you start over the route
- 30x more resources for something done under 80MB, such as Discord vs Kopete. The later had inline LaTeX. And video previews. In 2007.
- Invisible scrollbars with no intuitive use
- Flat design not being able to distinguish a button for the background layer. Compare it with Motif, W9x, BeOS, KDE3 with Keramik.
You can cite me.
How are you notable?
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